Saturday, March 21, 2020

This Is How Scary Italy's Situation Is

Italy reported 973 deaths yesterday. That's over 50% of their natural death rate.

Italy's population is about 60.5 M, and their "natural" death rate in 2019 was 10.566 per thousand people (1.0566%). That works out to 1,750 deaths per day. 973 deaths is 56% of that.

Italy's current Covid-19 death rate is 2.5 1.8 times Italy's average death rate in World War 2.

Italy saw 457,000 deaths in WW2 (military and civilian), with a population of 44 million. They fought for 3.25 years, from June 1940 to Sept 1943. That works out to an average death rate of 141,000 deaths per year, or 385 deaths per day, or 0.32% per year.

5 comments:

Ned said...

Yikes. That is really awful.

Keep in mind that "death rate" could refer to deaths per day or deaths per capita. The baseline population in the 1940s was lower (approx 75% of the current population) so you'd need to adjust things slightly for that comparison.

I've been looking at Italy's daily CV19 deaths over time and it's not clear whether they're starting to flatten a bit. Extrapolating out one week from now suggests somewhere between 1800 and 5000 *new* deaths on Mar 28, more or less. If the flattening is real it would be at the lower end of that range.

David Appell said...

Ned, that's a good point, adjusting to per capita, thanks. I forgot about that. So the comparison number to WW2 should be about 0.75*2.5 = 1.8

Ned said...

Also, just curious - what are you using as your data source? Worldometers says "793" deaths today, which looks suspiciously like a case of switched digits for your 973.

Ned said...

Oy, I should have clicked on the link in your post to see the source (NY Times article).

thefordprefect said...

a good source of data and customisable plots:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus